Cock-a-leekie

There are a great many soups that use a whole boiling fowl. Some of them are French, but I decided that this ancient and much loved Scottish dish was the one that I would like you to think of. Traditionally this was made with an old, tough cockerel. When the alpha male in your farmyard died, it was cooked over a low peat fire overnight for the next day’s supper. It’s a perfect dish to cook in the very slow oven of an Aga if you have one. You can actually buy young cockerels in the late spri